I have tested this and it does NOT work. I fixed the issue in couple of different ways:
One way is completely remove the unit (who in right mind does install updates during reboot on production servers?). I will be actively doing that on all machines I encounter. Another way is this: sed -i 's#/var/run/#/run/#g' /usr/share/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrade-shutdown So the problem with that sed is that the logging part will fail. So not really a solution. Systemd has proven to be inconsistent pile of crap so far... I could not make systemd to run this unit before local-fs.target. It appears that the documentation is misleading... -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to unattended-upgrades in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1654600 Title: unattended-upgrade-shutdown hangs when /var is a separate filesystem Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu: Fix Released Status in unattended-upgrades source package in Xenial: In Progress Status in unattended-upgrades source package in Yakkety: In Progress Status in unattended-upgrades package in Debian: New Bug description: [SRU justification] This fix is needed to make sure that the system does not hang on shutdown when /var is a speparate file system [Impact] System can hang up to 10 minutes if not fixed. [Fix] Change the systemd unit's ExecStart to an ExecStop so the unit is correctly sequenced. [Test Case] In a VM with /var separated from the / file system, shutdown the VM. It will hang for 10 minutes [Regression] None to be expected. A ExecStop unit will be sequenced before the Before= units which is earlier than previously. [Original description of the problem] The systemd unit file unattended-upgrades.service is used to stop a running unattended-upgrade process during shutdown. This unit file is running together with all filesystem unmount services. The unattended-upgrades service checks if the lockfile for unattended-upgrade (in /var/run) exists, and if it does, there is an unattended-upgrade in progress and the service will wait until it finishes (and therefore automatically wait at shutdown). However, if /var is a separate filesystem, it will get unmounted even though /var/run is a tmpfs that's still mounted on top of the /var/run directory in the /var filesystem. The unattended-upgrade script will fail to find lockfile, sleeps for 5 seconds, and tries to check the lockfile again. After 10 minutes (the default timeout), it will finally exit and the system will continue shutdown. The problem is the error handling in /usr/share/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrade-shutdown where it tries to lock itself: while True: res = apt_pkg.get_lock(options.lock_file) logging.debug("get_lock returned %i" % res) # exit here if there is no lock if res > 0: logging.debug("lock not taken") break lock_was_taken = True The function apt_pkg.get_lock() either returns a file descriptor, or -1 on an error. File descriptors are just C file descriptors, so they are always positive integers. The code should check the result to be negative, not positive. I have attached a patch to reverse the logic. Additional information: 1) Description: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Release: 16.04 2) unattended-upgrades: Installed: 0.90ubuntu0.3 Candidate: 0.90ubuntu0.3 Version table: *** 0.90ubuntu0.3 500 500 http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 Packages 500 http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main i386 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 0.90 500 500 http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages 500 http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main i386 Packages 3) Fast reboot 4) Very slow reboot (after a 10 minutes timeout) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unattended-upgrades/+bug/1654600/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp